Odd Fictions & Other Lies

Summer of Love, err, Doom

After a year and a half of work, ‘Artefactum’ is finally done.

Well, just the first draft, so, not really.

Shut up.

This novel had a very strange journey to completion. Because I was simultaneously working on other projects – A Recipe for Doom (comic), Detail: Nowhere (comic), A Fairy Tale (short film), this new website, etc – it took me a year just to write the first three chapters. Then, I got a little more focused and wrote two chapters in two months. Then I got REALLY focused and wrote five chapters in three months. In the last 90 days, I wrote about 85,000 words which would almost be a short novel all by itself. So, pat on the back to me.

However, because of the sheer speed at which I wrote, I wasn’t able to go back and fix a lot of things that I changed a long the way. A while back, I mentioned how it was impossible to do with ‘Artefactum’ what I did with ‘A Kind of Drug’ and serialize it online because the story was extremely fluid and I knew there’d be lots of occasions where as the story developed more, it would change events from the beginning of the book. Hard to explain, but it turned out to be very true. I have lots and lots of notes of things I need to change throughout the book. That is going to take a bit of time. Detailed editing will take even more. It will probably be at least another 6 weeks before the book is actually done. It’s 155,000 words as of right now which, for comparison’s sake, is about 7,000 words longer than ‘A Kind of Drug’. That book was 490 pages long, so ‘Artefactum’ will be in the 515 range. That is, of course, provided the book’s word count remains the same after editing.

I’ve also already begun work on the book’s cover which a friend of mine will be helping me with. It’s relatively simple in its design, so it shouldn’t be that difficult to make happen. Either way, I’m just working on it early on so it won’t be something that prevents the book’s timely release.

I’m also going to release two of my short stories for FREE to download off Amazon, iTunes, etc. Those stories will most likely be ‘Apocrypha’ and ‘A Single Sentence: The Tenth Crusade’. This is basically just a way to help promote myself and give people things to read for free to help coerce them into wanting to spend money to read my other works. Either way, if you haven’t read either of those stories, you’ll soon be able to read them for free.

In the meantime, my longtime friend and artist, Jon Lewis is nearing completion on Detail: Nowhere #1. The first issue is 28-pages long and he just finished the art for page 24 and has been a FIEND lately knocking these pages out. I expect the issue to be done and off the presses in about a month or so from now. He also already has the scripts for issues #2 and #3 and will begin drawing them at his leisure. I’ll write the scripts for #4 and #5 probably in July or August which will wrap up that series on my end.

Since I haven’t spoken much about it, Detail: Nowhere will be a 5-issue series of humorous sci-fi somewhere in the middle of Futurama, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Men in Black. The story centers around a space cop duo who are in charge of patrolling a vast and utterly boring region of the galaxy. The duo consists of a completely idiotic human and an almost equally idiotic – but angrier – sentient robot. This initial series not only serves as the duo’s origin story, but also sees them squaring off against a mysterious figure referred to as The Beast that is wreaking some very strange havoc in their normally boring sector of space.

This comic will be radically different from my normal prose work, which is usually very serious in nature. The comic is nothing but puns and poop jokes and nerd-culture references. It’s something that is meant to entertain you and make you laugh, but not really impart any wisdom or philosophy.

Much like Guy Fieri’s hair.

In the case of both of these works, after they’re published independently, I hope will be published professionally. Though that is a ton of work in and of itself and a tale for another day.